The Global Annual Achievement Awards

for Artificial Intelligence

the 2nd Annual Award Winners

The Global Annual Achievement Awards for Artificial Intelligence is now in its second year, and has significantly grown this year, both in terms of the number of categories of award and the number of votes received. These annual awards are to celebrate the various achievements of the AI community in developing new algorithms, products and services across a number of different categories and industries. We also acknowledged the work of startups and individuals who’s focus on AI is advancing the field. This year we have 17 categories covering a range of topics and sectors that shows how diverse the field of AI is and specifically how its application is spreading across many industries. We also announce the Person and Company as well as the AI Tool or Framework of the Year. A new addition to the awards this year is our Special Award for AI Achievement for the person, company, product or tool we feel most deserving of our recognition.

We are now pleased to announce the Winners of the 2nd AI Achievement Awards

(1) The Award for Best AI Startup

The Startup company should be developing some AI or ML related product or service, either to consumer or business users. The company can be based in any country in the world.

The Winner of the Best AI Startup Award is

AppZen is an artificial intelligence powered SaaS tool for automating business back office processes for large enterprises. The patented tool automates T&E expense report audit and detects fraud and compliance issues in real-time. AppZen’s tool combines Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing algorithms to capture and analyze expense report data, including document images, cross-check it with internal & external data sources and social media, and notify the audit team in real-time of any compliance issues and fraud.

AppZen was recently funded by well-known Fintech investors and has already brought on board a number of large enterprise customers such as Hitachi, Comcast, and Cantor Fitzgerald.

Winner of the Best Consumer Application of AI is

Unanimous have invented Artificial Swarm Intelligence, a method of combining humans and machines into intelligent systems. They call the system UNU. This resulted a number of stunning predictions this year that came true, all done for major journalists.

Winner of the Best AI in the Enterprise is

Conversica, the only AI-powered lead conversion company, is changing how the sales process is done. Conversica’s AI-powered software has had 8 million conversations between the AI and humans, has a 95% touch-less message handling rate, helped create more than $10 billion in revenue and is used by 15,000 sales representatives worldwide.

(4) Best use of AI in Robotics

Winner of the Best use of AI in Robotics is

Prome is creating fully autonomous applications and bring self driving cars to Level 5 using what they call Connectomic AI. It is a completely new method that goes beyond the approach used by every other tech company and car manufacturer. Imagine a future in which we aren’t wasting our resources attempting to reinvent 100 million years of biological R&D

(5) Best use of AI in Education

Application of AI for the purposes of education. This can be for use with children’s education, university students or self taught online training

Winner of the Best use of AI in Education is

Century aims to leverage advanced technology to provide a top-tier education for every individual. We want to improve learning outcomes by providing a personalised learning experience for our students and reducing workload for our teachers.

(6) Best use of AI in FinTech or Financial Applications

Application of AI in the Financial Tech Industry. Can be applications developed by Investment Banks, Retail Banks, Hedge Funds, Consultancy and Service Companies or FinTech Startups

Winner of the Best use of AI in FinTech is

KAI, a conversational AI platform, makes engaging with customers as natural as chatting. It weaves easily into their everyday lives. KAI Banking is conversational AI with deep financial knowledge. As a platform, it understands banking inside and out. From mundane requests to complicated tasks, banking is as easy and natural as sending a text — whether it’s on a bank’s mobile app or Facebook Messenger, SMS, or Slack. KAI Banking is an entirely new experience.

(7) Best use of AI in Legal Tech

Application of AI in the Legal Tech Industry. Can be applications developed by Law firms themselves, technology companies or consultancies providing products and services to the legal sector.

Winner of the Best use of AI in Legal Tech is

Luminance is a new class of document analysis software that will transform our approach to big data. Trained by legal experts, the revolutionary technology is founded on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence at the University of Cambridge.

Luminance understands language the way humans do, in volumes and at speeds that humans will never achieve. It provides an immediate and global overview of any company, picking out warning signs without needing any instruction.

Luminance adds value to a legal team, freeing lawyers to focus on what matters.

(8) Best use of AI in Customer Service

Applications of AI for the purpose of customer service, either consumer or business focused.

Winner of the Best use of AI in Customer Service is

The head of R&D department in axèlero, led the studies and implementation of a new graph based neural network inspired by quantum mechanics able to manage million of qubit/neuron and connections. The new NN needs no massive train but just one time teaching of “concepts” then able to make inferences even from concept for which it has not been instructed.

So far, against classic NN, the reported an accuracy near to 99,9% wronging just when there was a relevant modelling error by humans. Despite millions of nodes and relationships the new NN needs no high CPU or computational resources, it’s able to run inside a common laptop.
This project push forward to the next level performance of conversational AIs. In italy has been used to develop a open dialog conversational AI for customer care. The AI has been used for customer care in public administration to help people and citizens to interact with administration offices, modules, documents as well as information requests. The most effective one assists them for waste sorting providing useful informations.

Winner of the Best use of AI in Food, Health and Medicine is

WPC’s Condition Awareness Platform leverages artificial intelligence to deliver the time necessary to effectively treat sepsis by identifying it early. For decades, clinical indicators have been the accepted method of detecting sepsis. Although accurate, even combinations of these traditional clinical indicators don’t trigger action quickly enough.

Developed by one of the country’s leading data science companies and validated by one of the largest hospital corporations in America, WPC is now ready to share the discovery. With hundreds of variables distilled down to the most impactful, WPC creates an individual algorithm specific to each facility that matures and learns over time.

The platform’s effectiveness is based on both predictive analytics and the flexibility of implementing the notification into the clinical workflow. Hospitals operate differently, even among facilities within the same regional system or super system. Working with the leadership team, nursing staff and physicians, WPC creates the optimal solution proven to save lives and reduce expenses.

(10) Best us of AI for Automation

Applications of AI for process or system automation (sometimes called software robots) again either consumer or business focused.

Winner of the Best use of AI for Automation is

Efficient and sustainable Supply Chain operations in equipment-intensive service industries like BT require solving complex tactical constrained optimisation. The objective is to periodically decide on the placement of spare parts into sites while optimizing inherently concurrent business objectives such as minimising travel (reducing carbon footprint) and maximising service performance (benefiting customer experience).

The nominated tool, Intuitu Strategic Planner, incorporates AI based optimization models, such as evolutionary algorithm and machine learning, and periodically (or on-demand) executes them to maximise equipment spare coverage within a given distance from the deployed technology, given historical fault rates and a number of available facilities. This is a proactive approach to solving problem in that it predicts equipment’s spares demand and aims to periodically designate spare placement ahead or just in-time of business need. It also includes visual analytics functionality to support off-line identification of critical facilities and monitor critical metrics. This reduces the amount of excessive storage space and supports the move from a costly reactive storage policy to an agile demand-driven proactive approach.

(11) Best use of AI for NLP or NLG

Winner of the Best use of AI for NLP or NLG is

MindMeld built a deep-domain, natural-language chat assistant for leading retail brand Uniqlo

MindMeld has pioneered the development of technology to power a new generation of intelligent conversational interfaces. MindMeld was founded in 2011 by Tim Tuttle. A former AI researcher from MIT and Bell Labs, Tim saw how recent advances in AI would enable breakthrough applications driven by natural language, touch and gesture. After 3 years of technology development and 10 patents, MindMeld launched its core offering, the MindMeld platform, in 2014. MindMeld is the first platform that makes it possible for companies to create intelligent conversational interfaces for any app or device. MindMeld has been widely recognized as a leader in the field of natural language understanding and was named by Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the “100 Brilliant Companies” of 2015 and by MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s “50 Smartest Companies” of 2014.

(12) Best use of AI for Personal Assistants

Applications of AI for personal assistants (excluded customer service applications)

Winner of the Best use of AI for Personal Assistants is

Your AI powered personal assistant for scheduling meetings. You interact with me as you would to any other person – and I’ll do all the tedious email ping pong that comes along with scheduling a meeting. Founded in 2014, x.ai makes an artificial intelligence personal assistant who schedules meetings for you. We’re backed by blue chip investors, including IA Ventures, Firstmark, and Two Sigma Ventures, and located in New York City.

We’re a hardcore technology company, developing invisible software. We build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers—and every single team member, scientist or not, has a mission of delivering exceptional customer service at all times.

(13) AI Person of the Year

Person who has contributed most to the AI community in 2016. Either works for a company developing AI, is an academic or researcher in the field, or is supporting the AI community in some way.

Winner of the AI Company of the Year is

Afiniti is a world-leader in applied Artificial Intelligence solutions for businesses. Founded in 2007 with the primary objective of developing a transformative technology to improve contact center performance for large enterprises. Afiniti optimizes call outcomes by using artificial intelligence to pair agents with callers in real-time based on predicted interpersonal behavior. Every major telecom in the western hemisphere has partnered with Afiniti. To date, Afiniti has paired over 550 million calls around the world. Afiniti delivers precisely measurable results for its clients, which include T-Mobile USA, Vodafone, Sprint, Virgin Media, DirectTV, Caesars Entertainment, and Sky.

Winner of the AI Application of the Year is

Albert is the first-ever artificial intelligence marketing platform, driving fully autonomous digital marketing campaigns for some of the world’s leading brands. Created by Adgorithms in 2010, Albert’s mission is to liberate businesses from the complexities of digital marketing—not just by replicating their existing efforts, but by executing them at a pace and scale not previously possible. He serves as a highly intelligent and sophisticated member of brands’ marketing teams, wading through mass amounts of data, converting this data into insights, and autonomously acting on these insights, across channels, devices and formats, in real time. This eliminates the manual and time-consuming tasks that currently limit the effectiveness and results of modern digital advertising and marketing. Brands such as Harley Davidson, EVISU, Planet Blue, and Made.com credit Albert with significantly increased sales, an accelerated path to revenue, the ability to make more informed investment decisions, and reduced operational costs.

Winner of the Best AI Tool of Framework of the Year is

NuPIC is an open source project based on a theory of neocortex called Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM). Parts of HTM theory have been implemented, tested, and used in applications, and other parts of HTM theory are still being developed. Today the HTM code in NuPIC can be used to analyze streaming data. It learns the time-based patterns in data, predicts future values, and detects anomalies. NuPIC includes discussion groups on HTM theory, research on extending HTM, and source code for complete applications based on HTM. We welcome participation in all of these areas.

(17) The Special Award for AI Achievement

Our Special Award for a person, company, product or tool we feel deserving of our recognition.

Winner of the Special Award for AI Achievement is

Tree Logic presents a computer technology, “La Maieutique”, which will drive world data processing into a new aera : the aera of computer becoming “human”, communicative, intelligent and knowledge-hungry. Plus these key abilities we have been waiting from him since its inception : helpful, never forgetting a new knowledge, and user friendly.

Congratulations to all the Winners

Claim your Trophy

We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate all of the Winners for their hard work and dedication to the field of Artificial Intelligence in 2016. We hope these Awards are a small but welcomed acknowledgement of the great work that is being done across the world by so many people and companies. There are over 3,000 companies working on Artificial Intelligence with several billion dollars of venture capital invested to help develop the field. It is our aim that these Awards in some small way also help to support the AI Community by sharing the great work being done with those interested in the field of AI.

Claim your Trophy

Winners have 30 days to claim their trophy by submitting a request and send us your name and address.

Add Winners Badge to your Website

Winners can add the below badge to your website with a link back to this website.

Thank you for your Votes

Thankyou for your Support

We would also like to thank everyone that took the time to register their votes and nominate companies and individuals across the different categories. Without your support, these awards would not be possible, so thank you all very much for voting.

Keep in touch with us via our @Awards_AI for updates on our 3rd Awards which is going to be our biggest ever Awards for the recognition of the achievements within the field of AI.